Pathos is a recognized form of rhetoric. Until today, it had little real place in the law. The Connecticut Supreme Court changed all that with a 4-3 ruling in a case involving guns and the victims of the horrific mass shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2014. The Court’s ruling in Soto v. Bushmaster is no doubt en route to the United States Supreme Court, where, I suspect, minds more disciplined and less steeped in pathos will reverse.
If you were alive, sentient and in Connecticut on the morning of December 14,...
March 14, 2019
Gov. Ned Lamont lives in a bubble, and that bubble is impenetrable. I know this because he was once a potential juror on a criminal case I was trying in Stamford. The charge was attempted murder.
Bottom line: The judge, prosecutor and I agreed that after listening to Mr. Lamont’s answers to questions about the presumption of innocence, we all concluded he was unfit to serve. You see, Mr. Ned – I think of him as the human version of Mr. Ed, Wilbur’s talking horse – just couldn’t seem to commit to following the law. He was so busy...
February 20, 2019
I suppose it was inevitable that Connecticut’s Attorney General would sign on to California’s federal lawsuit seeking to block president Donald Trump from redirecting federal funds to build a border wall with Mexico. Watching Connecticut Attorney General William Tong run for office last year felt like watching a campaign for national office. Battling Billy Tong ran hard on his anti-Trump platform. I understood the politics even though I viewed the campaign as largely bombast.
But I have a question: How much is Battling Billy’s blather costing the State of...
February 20, 2019
Yuval Noah Harari is an Israeli historian with a love for the long view, as in where did we, as a species, come from, the topic of his first book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2014), and where we, as a species, are going, the topic of his second book, Home Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2016). Of course, the latter book depends on our ability to move from the past to the future through the challenges presented by the present. Just how will get from where we have been to where we are going?
He tackles the present in his third book, 21 Lessons for the...
February 17, 2019
February 11, 2019
I’ve never worn blackface, but I’ve laughed when I’ve seen actors like Bing Cosby do so. Just like I laughed when I saw...
January 10, 2019
It turns out that I am not the only person to notice the recent increase in Facebook censorship. Just yesterday I learned that a lawyer in California...
February 13, 2019
The panel of judges was uncomfortable. One judge wondered whether the United States government had brought the very issues it was...
January 3, 2019
I like to say the following to folks after one of my all-too-frequent displays of bad temper: “I’m sorry. I’m in AA. That outburst...
February 10, 2019
The apocalypse dawned for me in the summer of 1967.
I was living on Detroit’s East Side when all hell broke...
November 12, 2018
There’s not a whole lot written about identity politics and immigration that makes much sense. From the right come claims of...